The parrot piñata was perfect for a jungle-themed birthday party.  It was bright, festive, and compared to some of the other piñatas I've been asked to make, a fairly quick and simple project as well.  Or so I thought.

I had no idea what I was getting myself into.

The wings were clearly going to be the tricky part, but I just got two long, skinny balloons to use as supports and hung newspaper from them.  I applied a layer of papier mâché to the wings to stiffen them up a bit without adding much weight, then trimmed the wings into shape at the bottom, and I was ready to decorate.

And decorate.

And decorate.

And decorate.

Because I failed to do the math before I made the wings.

Each wing was a little more than 2 x 3 feet in size, which really doesn't sound like much.  But there are two wings, and each wing has a front and a back, and before I knew it I was looking at 25 square feet of surface area. That's 3600 square inches.  Each strip of snipped crepe paper that I glued down was about six inches long and a half inch wide:  a whopping 3 square inches.  I would need to cut and glue 1200 strips of crepe paper -- and that was just for the wings.  The bird's body was about four and a half feet long.  I'm lucky I'm not still working on it today.

(But if that sounds bad, wait till I get to the Porcupine Pufferfish piñata, where each piece of crepe paper I glued down covered only 1/16 of an inch...)

I wanted to make the parrot piñata look like a real bird species, but my daughter wanted purple here and blue here and green here and yellow here, and it was her party, so that's what she got.

This is an ex-parrot!

Anyone who knows me knew this was coming the whole time.